Bar of the week: Out Of The Blue at The Berkeley

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

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From gorgeous gifts to romantic getaways and the best places to take your beau out to celebrate, we've compiled the ultimate list of Valentine's Day ideas for her - as chosen by the women of GQ - to treat your better half with this 14 February

Bar of the week: Out Of The Blue at The Berkeley

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

Valentine's Day ideas that are guaranteed to impress her

From gorgeous gifts to romantic getaways and the best places to take your beau out to celebrate, we've compiled the ultimate list of Valentine's Day ideas for her - as chosen by the women of GQ - to treat your better half with this 14 February

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The dark side of Fort McMurray

An oil rush in the Canadian wilderness is turning an icy, isolated outpost into a boom town, where manual workers earn six figures and the partying is as hard, and dirty, as the work. So, what's the catch? British GQ headed to Fort McMurray for our March 2012 issue to join the black gold rush and find out

It’s -20°C. So cold that my nose hairs have turned brittle. So cold that the hair product on the handful of men in tight T-shirts who are milling about on the doorstep of the strip club, shuffling to keep warm and taking long drags on their cigarettes, has frozen solid.

Inside, Janessa Styles, Miss Nude Showgirl 2011, is performing the "crucifix" on stage. In a darkened corner, at the back, is an electronic, arcade-style punchbag; in front of that, a queue of testosterone-fuelled men take it in turns to try to demolish the leather ball using nothing but brute force and coiled aggression. I’m surprised it still functions, so ferocious are the blows.

After Styles leaves the stage, three men, decked in Ed Hardy gear (the garish, rhineStone-adorned uniform of choice for the archetypal International Douchebag) and wearing baseball caps, sit transfixed by the next stripper, who waves her naked behind in their faces. One man pulls out a handful of coins, known locally as "loonies", and begins throwing them, one by one, Eric Bristow-style, at her backside. It's a classy move.

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Site workers - who can earn as much as £3,200 a week - flash the cash at Showgirls club

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A few feet away sits Frankie, dressed in a Crooks & Castles T-shirt and expensive "dirty” jeans, pounding a Corona and a vodka chaser. He is squeezed into a leather-cushioned booth with his friends and beaming from ear to ear. After flexing his muscles for the GQ photographer, Frankie, unprompted, pulls a $50 banknote from his pocket, turns, bends over and begins showing a jeering crowd just how disposable money is round here. Let's just say if this were an Andrexco mercial, even the puppy would be blushing.

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Shouting over the music, he says that he and his "boys" earn between £1,600 and £3,200 a week working in the oil fields. There are a fair few women in here, too. One regular says it's the only place in town she doesn't get harassed.

It's clear why getting harassed is unlikely when you meet "Bear", the 59-year-old comanager of this strip joint. He is at least 6' 5", bull-necked and has Maori-style warrior tattoos all over his face. When he says he built Showgirls with his bare hands 16 years ago, you tend to believe him. Showgirls is located a few miles shy of Canada's Arctic tundra in a town called Fort McMurray – a place as close to the middle of nowhere as you'd ever want to be. Bear has two other strip clubs, one 300 miles South and another 400 miles west of here; together they turn over £3.2m a year. But this one, in Fort Mac, is by far the most lucrative.

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Welcome to Canada's last true frontier: a remote outpost that happens to be home to what is possibly the largest oil repository on the planet- an ocean of bitumen-soaked sand – and what has become the world's biggest construction project (you can see it from Space) designed to scoop or suck up the tarry bitumen and turn it into oil. Unfortunately, just like the gold-rush towns of the 1800s, Fort McMurray – or Fort McMoney as it's now known – has become synonymous with crime, an explosion in prostitution and the tough,young, bored single men with too much money and too little to do who are fuelling the chaos. Fort McMurray is a town in the boom and on the brink.

Our story begins three days before, in Edmonton, a few hundred miles south of Fort McMurray. It's Thursday morning and the roads outside our hotel are as treacherous as you might imagine after being pummelled by the city's first winter storm. It's not the best morning, perhaps, to negotiate the "Highway of Death".

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Unless you take a long detour, Highway 63 is the only route to Fort McMurray. The road gets its nickname from the idiotic drivers who use it and the even more dangerous single lane in either direction. Today, we've got this to confront as well as snow plumes blasting across the tarmac like ocean spindrift, and next to no visibility. One of the most dangerous days to travel to Fort Mac is a Thursday – shift changeover for the oil workers. And so, conveniently, we picked a snowy Thursday morning to negotiate a one-lane road through some of the remotest territory in North America.

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September forest fires torched a lot of the aspens and firs that usually carpet this landscape, so, for much of the journey, a white canvas stretches to the horizon, studded with burnt stumps and new, spindly growth. It's all rather bleak; the sort of place Michael Bay would use for an apocalyptic final Scene.Imposing billboards pushing jewellery, Harley-Davidsons and £450,000 homes greet you as you approach Fort Mac. The first thing I notice is how big it is: because of its location, this should be a town of a few hundred people, but in just 20 years the population has more than tripled and it's now a city of 65,000, bursting at the seams; a boom town where the buildings are simply not going up fast enough to meet demand. What's more, they’ve only tapped a fraction of the bitumen that's available. In the opus of the Canadian oil sands, only the first few chords have been struck.

We pull up outside the Ace Inn Hotel. My phone rings; it's one of my contacts, Gitz Deranger, a local youth worker. “Man, be careful," he says. “The hotel's OK, but all the drug deals go down behind there. And there's a lot of prostitution." There's tension building between a group of young men in the lobby. I can’t work out what the argument is over, but they mention money and, for the next 15 minutes, seem to be doing relays up and down a flight of stairs and in and out of the hotel doors.

Podollan's pub is, thankfully, only a few blocks away, and it's there that we head to warm up. Although I'd heard theratio of dating-age men to women is around 20:1, I'm surprised to see a more even mix in this bar tonight. Until I realise all the women are wearing identical Red Bull T-shirts and all work here. They all have boyfriends, too, but I'm guessing the punters are thankful for small mercies. On a normal night, the girls make £200 in tips alone; on a good night, £250 to £300.

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Kevin Cloutier, the generalmanager, arrived in Fort Mac 15 months ago from Ontario with his wife and three children. He earns double what he would elsewhere in Canada. Kevin sees a lot of opportunity here. His friend lived here for six years and earned so much money working as a scaffolder he bought a gold mine. A lot of the men who come to Fort Mac to find work in the oil sands are either single or leave their partners back home. I meet Ed, a drywaller from Ontario. Ed's divorced and supporting his daughter through college. He tells me Fort Mac is boring. “You drink, sleep, work, that's it,” he says. “And the women are too young. But everyone here likes Jägermeister and they all buy shots for you.”

By midnight, Podollan's is full of men in their twenties wearing tight, graphic T-shirts emblazoned with UFC logos. Each of them, it seems, is sporting a backwards baseball cap, two sleeves of tattoos and steroid-fed biceps.

Podollan's pub is, thankfully, only a few blocks away, and it's there that we head to warm up. Although I'd heard theratio of dating-age men to women is around 20:1, I'm surprised to see a more even mix in this bar tonight. Until I realise all the women are wearing identical Red Bull T-shirts and all work here. They all have boyfriends, too, but I'm guessing the punters are thankful for small mercies. On a normal night, the girls make £200 in tips alone; on a good night, £250 to £300.

Kevin Cloutier, the generalmanager, arrived in Fort Mac 15 months ago from Ontario with his wife and three children. He earns double what he would elsewhere in Canada. Kevin sees a lot of opportunity here. His friend lived here for six years and earned so much money working as a scaffolder he bought a gold mine. A lot of the men who come to Fort Mac to find work in the oil sands are either single or leave their partners back home. I meet Ed, a drywaller from Ontario. Ed's divorced and supporting his daughter through college. He tells me Fort Mac is boring. “You drink, sleep, work, that's it,” he says. “And the women are too young. But everyone here likes Jägermeister and they all buy shots for you.”

By midnight, Podollan's is full of men in their twenties wearing tight, graphic T-shirts emblazoned with UFC logos. Each of them, it seems, is sporting a backwards baseball cap, two sleeves of tattoos and steroid-fed biceps.

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I mention Ed, the drywaller who feels there's nothing to do except drink, work and sleep, but Haukeness is adamant Ed isn't looking hard enough. Certain people here are fiercely protective of this place, not to mention wary of outside media. “Everybody knows we have issues and I don't expect you to ignore those," Haukeness says. “But we also know this is a good community."

Over the past few years, the headlines have chronicled Fort McMurray's descent into lawlessness. Five years ago, while Canada's crime rate fell, Fort Mac's shot up by 23 per cent. Then, the Edmonton Journal said cocaine was easier to buy here than pizza. Two years ago, the police announced plans to shift its focus from its drug unit in favour of a larger gang enforcement task force. In October, one of the city's biggest drug dealers, Jeffrey Caines, was sentenced to 14 years after admitting to trafficking cocaine, but experts said he would soon be replaced by larger organisations. Hope springs eternal, however. In 2011, police said criminal prosecutions for violent crime, property crime and vehicle theft all dropped, though arrests for drug trafficking went up.

City slickers: The ‘Highway of Death’ links Fort McMurray and Edmonton

Matt Rainwaters

Constable Christina Wilkins of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invites us for a ride-along – in a car, thankfully, not on horseback. It's more of a guided tour of the city because she doesn't anticipate any 911 calls so early in the morning. If Fort McMurray ever needs a public-relations person, Wilkins would be perfect. The city has gone "from boom town to hometown", she says. Her cost of living is subsidised; there are parks in which her children can play; there's the largest recreation centre in western Canada and a spiritual quarter being built for a number of faiths.

As for the crime, there's a line Wilkins likes to repeat: drug and gang problems are “on a par with other metropolitan cities of this size"; homelessness is "no different than any other large city”; assaults and vandalism? “No different from any other municipality of this size"; and pub brawls? “No worse here than another area of its size." Besides, Wilkins tells me that 80 to 90 per cent of bad things I’ve heard are hearsay. And 90 per cent of statistics are made up, right?

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Wilkins says she'd give people the same advice she gives trick-or-treaters: "Don't go down dark alleys." Because presumably the Somali gangs and Hell's Angels who run the drugs and prostitution rackets in Fort McMurray only do dark alleys. Yes, you heard right: Somaligangs in the frozen north. According to Edmonton police, they work a circuit which includes Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Fort McMurray, use guns imported from America, have been involved in gang-related murder and introduced khat, a Somali amphetamine, to bolster their narcotic arsenal.

But the reason it’s extraordinary here is its remoteness, and the fact there is an incredible amount of crime for a city in the middle of nowhere is due to the vast salaries dished out to young men who have never seen their pockets bulging with banknotes before.

Syncrude, one of the companies harvesting the vast oil sands

Matt Rainwaters

The mayor of Fort Mac, Melissa Blake, later tells me that the term "boom town" is loaded with stereotypes, but she also concedes that oil workers, either single or separated from family for long periods of time, “may have different kinds of entertainment choices than a family would have". It's delicately put, but Mayor Blake is frustrated they blame the community for their discord and loneliness.

That night we head first to Moxie's Classic Grilland talk to the almost exclusively female staff. Their stories are strikingly similar: most have been here less than a year, all came for the money, and many plan to leave at some point in the next year or so.

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One girl tells me Fort Mac has its share of gold diggers. She's specifically talking about women, but that isn't always the case. Earlier that day I'd seen a CD for sale in a café by a local artist called Freddy Marshall. One of the tracks was called: "Looking For A Woman With A Syncrude Job". Syncrude is one of the big oil companies here.

Nicole Shipley, a 25-year-old Ottawan, and her friend Whitney Land, 24, are just the sort of girls who gold-digging men are after. Nicole quither job, sold everything (“even my furniture") and came here after a cousin told her what she could earn; Whitney followed a boyfriend. Today, with overtime, both girls make £100,000 a year driving a 400-tonne Caterpillar 797 – one of the largest trucks on the planet. “We have to go up a hydraulic ladder just to get into the cab,” Nicole says.

Whitney didn't even have a driving licence when she started, but as the oil company (neither will reveal which) operates on private land, it didn't matter. She came from a small town that didn't have a McDonald's, to Fort Mac where she now drives a vehicle that makes a monster truck look like a twodoor Smart car.

The less-than-salubrious location of Diggers nightclub

Matt Rainwaters

The oil sands cover 88,000 square miles, roughly the size of Great Britain. Canada now supplies more oil to America than any other country, and in addition to the nasty social fallout, inevitably, there has been a fairly horrendous environmental impact to all this, too. One of its biggest PR problems is its appearance. Although while I'm here the tar sands are covered in a layer of snow, most of the time the mine sites look like somebody's vision of hell: a black, caustic wasteland that stretches for miles in every direction, accessed via a snaking network of mud roads.

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At the moment, the bitumen is largely extracted via mining: it takes around two tonnes of tar sand to make just one barrel of oil, and for every barrel, uses enough natural gas to heat a home for four days. The oil industry says that in future, mine sites will account for just 20 percent of the operation; that the vast majority will be in situ drilling (imagine a forest peppered with oil wells, rather than the barren wasteland devoid of trees).

Greenpeace says this may look more ecological, but it uses more energy. Drilla hole in the Middle East and oil spurts out. Do that in the Canadian tar sands, and, well, nothing happens. Bitumen is hard and unless you dig it up, it has to be steamed out.

And creating steam from water burns greenhouse gas like it's going out of fashion. It came as little surprise last December when Canada announced it was formally withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol on climate change. But so keen is the oil industry to get some positive press, that one of the companies, Cenovus, flew its senior vice president of operations, Drew Zieglgansberger, here to meet me.

Zieglgansberger's a likeable guy. He started out as a roughneck working the rigs, and now, at just 36, helps run the company. He has children and doesn't want them growing up thinking their father recklessly poisoned the environment for them. He points out that Cenovus reuses and recycles a lot of the materials it uses, and says technology will solve the problems of reducing impact on the land further. So what about calls for a moratorium while these more efficient means of extraction are worked out? “Won't work," he says. “You can only learn so much in lab or simulation. Plus investors won't allow money to be spent unless development happens." But he concedes the industry needs improving.

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Then there's the thorny issue of the First Nations aboriginal people who were here long before the oil companies. Oil sands opponents say their identity is so closely entwined with the land that wiping out the boreal forest, in which they’ve trapped, hunted and fished for centuries, is tantamount to ethnocide.

The oil industry promotes itself in local schools and as a result, First Nations children see it as the key to big bucks, iPads, iPods and Ford F350 trucks. The painful irony is that the only attractive jobs on offer are in an industry that is destroying their culture.

There have also been some mysterious illnesses along the Athabasca River — rare cancer clusters in remote communities north of Fort McMurray. Some, like water ecologist David Schindler, say pollution by the oil companies is to blame, and in 2010, armed with tubs of deformed fish, Schindler and others asked the Canadian government to step in. As a result, it announced comprehensive environmental monitoring of water, air, animals and plants.

We've arranged to drive a few miles up the road to see the oil sands for ourselves. Hip Deranger, our guide and Gitz's brother, is a First Nations Blackfoot/Dene Indian. He has five children, ranging from two years old to ten. When he was young he remembers coming down to the banks of the Athabasca with his brothers to fish. He used to swim in the river, but today he won't allow his own children to do so.

We pull up next to one of the vast “tailing ponds" used to store the discarded, toxic water used in the extraction process. Large cannons scare away birds. I ask Deranger how it makes him feel looking at the pond. “It hurts my heart, man," he says. “My ancestors moved down this way from Fort Chip in the early 1890s. I realise how much our people need this land. It is a part of them."

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Deranger once worked for an oil company as a Welder, but left to work for his brother. As his contemporaries got better jobs and more pay, he says he saw them change. “Their mentality was, ‘Let’s go to the gym, get big man, all 'roided up, we've got money to spend."

A few years ago, Deranger's dad got jumped by some oil workers while he was walking home. They didn't beat him up badly, but the next day Deranger and his four brothers came up with a plan. He went out walking “and sure enough the same vehicle drove by. The guys were shouting, 'Hey, you stupid fooing Indian.' And then my brothers all came out..." Deranger, if you haven't guessed, isn't too happy about the oil giants moving in. He's not the only one. Later that afternoon I meet Bill. That's not actually his name, but he works in the oil industry and smokes a lot of weed, so he'd rather remain anonymous. Bill's story is interesting because he was actually born in Fort McMurray – something of a rarity. His dad got rich working the oilfields. Bill joined him, but he hates it. He says there's more to life and plans to move to Vancouver to become a musician.

The town has struggled to accommodate the population boom

Matt Rainwaters

Bill says Fort Mac bars are full of "juice monkeys" (steroid users, for the unacquainted) and the drug of choice for oil workers is cocaine because it doesn't stay in the system as long. He attributes the drug problem here to the fact there's nothing else to spend money on. To avoid drug testing on site, some people, he says, use fake bladders, known as "urinators". Once Bill updated his Facebook status with: "I need someone's clean pee before 8pm, please.” He got it.

"Fort Mac saps the dreams out of you because you get trapped," he says. “People come for the money, plan to stay a few years, but become complacent." They're known round here as "lifers".

Ah, the money. Yes. Back at the Ace Inn Hotel, I decide to ringan escortagency to find out how they'refaring in the boom. Daphney, 24, the owner of Daphney's Escorts, arrived in August. She and her girls charge £100 more per hour than the average elsewhere in Canada. "That's $350 (£220) total for an hour's work," she says, “And everybody's making it.”

Lately, the phone hasn't stopped ringing at Daphney's and she says every guy has the same story: there are no girls in Fort Mac. The men here aren't all that internet savvy, so Daphney advertises in the Yellow Pages and work is getting more plentiful as a result. Each girl takes between 25 and 30 calls a week, making around £3,000. And as the men work six days on, six days off, they'll usually keep a girl for several nights. “They work hard. They play hard,” she says.

Daphney doesn’t like Fort Mac much, though. There's no shopping, no good food, and everything closes early.That night, I head to the local casino, appropriately called Boomtown. Inside it looks like a Butlin's nightclub, with garish carpet that's seen better days and a maze of slot machines. Iblag my way into a side room where they're charging to see the UFC fight. A tableful of five young oil workers with baseball caps and tattooed biceps is glued to the screen; the kind of guys who have trucks with plastic testicles.

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It's late by the time we turn up at Diggers Variety Club, which along with the Oil Can Tavern and Teasers strip club, is situated in the Oilsands Hotel. It's rammed. Inside, the walls flex and sweat. But among the leering drunks, I'm surprised to see a genuinely multicultural crowd. I'm stared at as I make my way across the dance floor to the back of the bar and I'm not there ten minutes before I'm offered a bag of cocaine.

Only when the club shuts and the bouncers turf everyone out into the sub-zero night do things start to look different. Fuelled by alcohol, tribal allegiances take hold and Somalis, locals and lifers pull together like magnets. Some peel off to the gas station opposite where a queue forms at the fried chicken concession. Someone pours coffee over someone else in an attempt to provoke a fight. He gets his wish. Chaos erupts around me, but as I walk out into the cold, I can't help notice Canada's Globe And Mail newspaper in the rack. There's a story on the cover about how American debt talks are on the brink of collapse and that, in the wake of the Great Recession, high unemployment will linger for years. Not that Fort McMurrayites need to worry. Here in the frozen "wild west", the boom is only just beginning.

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